Magento 1: why the upgrade process drastically changed?

Question

So back in the days (not too far though as upgrades before 1.5 were super painful), the upgrade process for Magento 1 could basically be done by one of those two lines (depending if you installed/upgraded Magento via command line before or not):

./mage upgrade-all
./mage install http://connect20.magentocommerce.com/community Mage_All_Latest --force

However, for the last year (maybe more ?), the upgrade documented officially (available here: http://devdocs.magento.com/guides/m1x/install/installing_upgrade_details.html) recommends a way longer and more painful process, especially the steps were you have to:

• archive the custom themes and extensions,
• download fresh Magento files
• transfer the archives to the new Magento folder

So my questions are:

• can one still upgrade via ./mage ? if so, what are the risks ?
• why did Magento stop recommending the usage of ./mage to upgrade ?

Answer 1

there are only 2 safest options to upgrade magento 1:

1 - overwrite files from zip archives.
2 - build a new shop and export/import required data.

upgrading with ./mage is a lottery, it will bring you a lot of issues, like missing / broken files, versions lockups, permissions and unknown errors.

what about magento recommendations - i only trusted in security patches, other is crap, i just realized and from today i will never recommend to read magento docs/manuals etc.. people on the field and people behind magento wiki are absolutely different...

Answer 2

I haven't tested this but the mage command is based on the Magento Connect Downloader. The downloader itself does not play well with changes that did't happen through it. For example if you installed an extension by deploying the files directly and then tried to install the same extension via the downloader (or any other extension that happens to have the same file) it would error out because it can't handle the existing files and will not overwrite them.

This obviously becomes problematic once you throw security patches into the mix.

• Install Magento 1.x
• Apply Security X patch that creates file Y
• At a later time try to upgrade to Magento 1.x + 1 (which presumably has the security patch, file Y included) you would encounter the existing file error.

I am not 100% if modifications are problematic too (the pear package definitions do include checksums).

So my guess, once they realised the issues with the upgrade process they started moving away from it (undoing all the patches to then be able to upgrade, to then selectively re-apply patches doesn't sound that great a process).